Music

"People feel sometimes something singing within them. Such a song is never disharmonious. One can rejoice when such vibrations stir one’s being. 18."

"Once, according to an old legend, there came a messenger from a distant world to give people equality, brotherhood and joy. Long since had people forgotten their songs. They remained in a stupor of hate. The messenger banished darkness and crowdedness, smote infection, and instituted joyful labor. Hatred was stilled, and the sword of the messenger remained on the wall. But all were silent and knew not how to begin singing. Then the messenger assembled the little children, led them into the woods, and said to them: “These are your flowers, your brooks, your trees. No one has followed us. I shall rest—and you fill yourselves with joy.” Thereupon, timidly they ventured into the forest. At last the littlest one came to a meadow and sighted a ray of the sun. Then a yellow oriole sounded its call. The little one followed it, whispering. And soon joyously he sang out, “The sun is ours!” One by one the children gathered upon the meadow, and a new hymn to Light rang out. The messenger said: “Man has again begun to sing. Come is the date!” 162"

"You know about the special musical instruments that are in Our possession. Urusvati has heard them. The refined scale and rhythm of Sister Oriole should be acknowledged as the highest harmony. Often such singing has served to bring peace to the world... One should learn how to develop one’s own musicality by all possible means. The heart’s feeling is sensed not in the words themselves but in their sound. There can be no irritation in harmony. Malice cannot exist where the spirit ascends. It is not by chance that in antiquity the epic scriptures were sung, not only to facilitate memorizing but also for inspiration. Likewise, it is rhythm and harmony that protect us against fatigue. The quality of music and rhythm should be developed from infancy."

"Urusvati has developed her musical talent beautifully. This proficiency is achieved as the result of much labor in other lives. According to the Teachings of Plato, music should not be understood in the narrow sense of music alone, but as participation in all the harmonious arts. In singing, in poetry, in painting, in sculpture, in architecture, in speech, and, finally, in all manifestations of sound, musicality is expressed. In Hellas a ceremony to all the Muses was performed. Tragedy, dance, and all rhythmic movement served the harmony of Cosmos. Much is spoken about beauty, but the importance of harmony is little understood. Beauty is an uplifting concept, and each offering to beauty is an offering to the equilibrium of Cosmos. Everyone who expresses music in himself sacrifices, not for himself, but for others, for humanity, for Cosmos. Perfection of thought is an expression of beautiful musicality. The highest rhythm is the best prophylaxis, a pure bridge to the highest worlds. Thus We affirm Beauty in Our Abode. Urusvati has noted that the music of the spheres is characterized by a harmony of rhythm. It is precisely this quality that brings inspiration to humanity. People usually do not think about the sources of inspiration, but if they did they would help Our work greatly. 42."

"Be like the grasshopper and make night musical. Nightly wash your bed and water your couch with your tears. Watch and be like the sparrow alone upon the housetop. Sing with the spirit, but sing with the understanding also. 1 Corinthians 14:15 And let your song be that of the psalmist: Bless the Lord, O my soul; and forget not all his benefits; who forgives all your iniquities; who heals all your diseases; who redeems your life from destruction. Can we, any of us, honestly make his words our own: I have eaten ashes like bread and mingled my drink with weeping? Yet, should we not weep and groan when the serpent invites us, as he invited our first parents, to eat forbidden fruit, and when after expelling us from the paradise of virginity he desires to clothe us with mantles of skins such as that which Elijah, on his return to paradise, left behind him on earth? 2 Kings 2:13 Say to yourself: What have I to do with the pleasures of sense that so soon come to an end? What have I to do with the song of the sirens so sweet and so fatal to those who hear it?"

"Three merry boys, and three merry boys, And three merry boys are we, As ever did sing in a hempen string Under the gallow-tree."

"Come, sing now, sing; for I know you sing well; I see you have a singing face."

"The softer you sing, the louder you're heard."

"I suffer so much in this life, Doro. That is what they feeling when I sing, that is why they cry. People who felt nothing in this life cannot sing. Once I had a great suffering and from it came a new voice."

"Let's sing now because life is leaving"

"The tenor's voice is spoilt by affectation, And for the bass, the beast can only bellow; In fact, he had no singing education, An ignorant, noteless, timeless, tuneless fellow."

"Debe ser la caricia de lo inútil,/la tristeza sin fin de ser poeta,/de cantar y cantar, sin que se rompa/la tragedia sin par de la existencia."

"I saw the people gather/I heard the music start/The song that they were singing/Is ringing in my heart"

"[W]ant to bring it? Bring it. But, we ain't singing. We're bringing drama."

"The cream of the underground will be there. Everybody's coming from all over the country. There'll be drugs and psychedelics and music and riots."

"I'm not worried about the security particularly. If people have enough to do, there won't be trouble."

"And this is the moment I will never forget as long as I live: a quarter mile away in the darkness, on the other edge of this bowl, there was some guy flicking his Bic, and in the night I hear, 'Don't worry about it John. We're with you.' I played the rest of the show for that guy.""

"We were ready to rock out and we waited and waited and finally it was our turn... ...there were a half million people asleep. These people were out. It was sort of like a painting of a Dante scene, just bodies from hell, all intertwined and asleep, covered with mud."

"I think it was fantastic. I think the only way its been overdone was thinking it changed the world, politically and as far as the war went. It was only a part of things. It wasn’t it."

"Notwithstanding their personality, their dress and their ideas, they were and they are the most courteous, considerate and well-behaved group of kids I have ever been in contact with in my 24 years of police work."

"Like wow, these people are really beautiful, the cops, the storekeepers, the army, everybody."

"Men reached the moon in July 1969, and Woodstock began three weeks later. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that this was when the hippies took over the country, and when the true cultural war over Progress was lost. Today's aged hippies no longer understand that there is a difference between the election of a black president and the creation of cheap solar energy; in their minds, the movement towards greater civil rights parallels general progress everywhere. Because of these ideological conflations and commitments, the 1960s Progressive Left cannot ask whether things actually might be getting worse."

"I guess this was meant to happen, and everybody is still with us. We're going to go on all night with the music."

"The whole thing is a gas. I dig it all, the mud, the rain, the music, the hassles."

"We're vestiges of our former selves."

"I hope David can hear it."

"You aren't taking poison acid. The acid's not poison. It's just badly manufactured acid. You are not going to die. We have treated 300 cases and it's all just badly manufactured acid. So if you think you've taken poison, you haven't. But if you're worried, just take half a tablet."

"If we had any inkling that there was going to be this kind of attendance, we certainly would not have gone ahead. … We've had a very averse situation here... Financially speaking, of course, the festival is a disaster."

"It's about the quietest, most well-behaved 300,000 people in one place that can be imagined. There have been no fights or incidents of violence of any kind."

"Good morning! What we have in mind is breakfast in bed for four hundred thousand."

"Don't bother Max's cows. Let them moo in peace."

"Stop Max's Hippie Music Festival. No 150,000 hippies here. Buy No Milk."

"As far as I know the narcotics guys are not arresting anybody for grass. If we did there isn't enough space in Sullivan (county) or the next three (sic) "countries" to put them in."

"Anybody who tries to comes here is crazy. Sullivan County is a great big parking lot."

"My parents knew there'd be drugs there, that it'll be a bit wild. They didn't want me to come. I know there'll be drugs everywhere and I wonder what it will all be like. I've never been away from home before. I wonder what will happen to all of us."

"The metronome is one of the greatest technique builders available to the teacher or the pupil."

"The objection, sometimes heard, that using a metronome tends to make a player mechanical, is not founded on facts. Indeed, the students who play the most artistically are those who have been the most faithful in the use of their metronome when learning their pieces."

"I’ve got a metronome app on my phone because I often have riffs in my head that I think will go together but when I play them to a beat, one will work and the other will be a different tempo. I use the metronome so I know before I show Paul [Bostaph – Slayer’s drummer] the riffs work together."

"Often, the metronome by itself may not be enough to learn complex rhythms. However, its importance for all types of practicing and all genres cannot be understated. The infallibility of the machine is a blessing since it removes guesswork; thus, the player can use the metronome to learn to play evenly and to resist the temptation to take extra time when playing a difficult passage. The player must begin with the premise that the metronome is mathematically perfect and categorically correct. From there, s/he must make a personal commitment to play exactly together with this perfect "chamber music partner.""

"Before a student can be persuaded to use a metronome, he or she has to know why it is important. The most obvious answer is to help keep rhythms even and clean. Another reason is to keep the meter consistent, placing beats in their proper positions in the music. Metronomes can also help a student to find and fix problems. ... The metronome quickly alerts the player to these problems by suddenly not clicking in time with the player's beats."

"Because its beat is perfectly steady, the metronome is an excellent practice tool for musicians. Practicing with a metronome is extremely useful for developing and maintaining rhythmic precision, for learning to keep consistent tempos, for countering tendencies to slow down or speed up in specific passages, and for developing evenness and accuracy in rapid passages. Most music teachers consider the metronome indispensable, and most professional musicians, in fact, continue to practice with a metronome throughout their careers."

"Harold Bauer once said that the most impressive performance of "Lohengrin" he ever heard was the time the Boston Symphony played it for rehearsal from beginning to end with the metronome."

"Everyone knows that after a piece has been thoroughly tested and stabilized with the metronome, the necessary rhythmic variations, the accelerandos, the ritardandos, the ad libs, the tempo rubatos may be introduced far more intelligently and artistically."

"Metrical exactitude ... is the embodiment of slavishness in music, i.e., the music is the slave of the beat when it should be its master, exactly the opposite of what C.P.E. Bach suggested, in his Essay on the "True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments," when he wrote that one should "endeavor to avoid everything mechanical and slavish. Play from the soul, not like a trained bird." Like the beating of the heart, the musical pulse needs to fluctuate in speed as the emotional content of the music fluctuates. Like the natural shifting accents in speech, musical accents need to shift according to the meaning being expressed. To feel perfect, music must be metrically imperfect."

"Phrasing. The art of dividing a melody into groups of connected sounds so as to bring out its greatest musical effect including also the placing of accent — cres. and decres., rall. and accel., rubato, etc. [...]"

"The art of phrasing by a performer is often instinctive and is one of the features by which a supreme artist may be distinguished from one of lesser inspiration, whether conductor, singer, or instrumentalist."

"The art of phrasing is essential for expressiveness in music. The impact of a musical phrase is dependent on how it is shaped by the individual performer, who [...] will have considerable freedom in structuring the perceptual surface of the musical auditory stream. At the level of the individual phrase, there are infinite possibilities for variation of the so-called expressive devices in music, such as timing and dynamic shape."

"Phrasing is always something essentially personal. It has really no fixed laws [...] and depends wholly on the musical and the poetical sense of the performer."

"No two artists phrase the same passage in exactly the same manner"

"[...] Phrasing, like other more aesthetic branches [...], is one of those things for which a detailed scheme of instruction cannot well be laid down. It can be demonstrated, violin in hand, but not described. Furthermore, the violinist is characteristically so dependant on the mood of the moment, the accidental influence of temper and disposition, that the same musician seldom plays the same phrase twice in exactly the same manner."